The Atheist Civil-Liberty Union?

Michael Novak

The American Civil Liberties Union has a public agenda...to make the United States in
all her public manifestations reflect an atheist's view of the nation's Founding and
continuing existence...

Secularism, the world's best hope for tolerance, will then rule triumphant, sweetly,
having driven its foes from every inch of public existence.

Problem is, such fellows blink at the point grasped so fearlessly by Nietzsche. If the
answer to the Big Question is chance, then all the coherence among the little questions
may mean nothing at all -- is intelligible only in appearances, and is otherwise a big
lie. Courage is not really any better than cowardice; that's only a preference. Hate is
not really worse than love; to think so is merely a weakling's prejudice. Freedom is no
better than slavery; both are equally absurd. Destructiveness is no better and no worse
than creativity.

What makes the life of the ACLU difficult is that the actual history of the United
States has been borne aloft on the wings of Jewish and Christian faith since its very
beginning:

The first act of the First Continental Congress in 1774 was a motion to pause for
prayer...

Commander-in-chief Washington ordered his soldiers to begin each day with public
prayer...

During the Jefferson administration, the largest church service in the United States
was held in the US Capitol Building, and Jefferson publicly attended...

There, for Madison (as for the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Statute of Religious
Liberty), on ground that comes not from philosophy but from Judaism and Christianity and
them alone, lies the foundation of natural rights. Arguments from philosophy may
complement this religious conviction. But they are not nearly so tight or precise in
pinpointing the individual conscience, or the source of its sacred inviolability.

So also, Tom Paine sailed to France in 1789 to beg the French revolutionaries not to
turn to atheism, lest in that way they undercut the ground of their human rights. Paine
was no orthodox Christian or Jew of any stripe, but from such sources he had imbibed much
about conscience, Final Judgment, and the ground of human rights. He warned the Jacobins
that atheism would lead to rivers of blood. He was thrown into jail as many meddlesome
preachers before him had been. A great deal of blood flowed, in the name of Reason, as he
had feared.